A fine article by Harry Fuecks over at phpPatterns(). Harry goes into detail on a number of PEAR packages including:
- PHP Mole, the PHP-GTK based IDE
- phpDocumentor, how to create self-documenting code
- PHPUnit, unit testing for PHP
- Quickform, a remarkable form package that can turn a nightmare form project into a breeze
- Net_FTP
- Cache, a full-featured, script-level caching solution
- XML_Tree
- the PEAR SOAP package
- and more
Notably missing, in my opinion, is DB_Dataobect, which I hope to publish a tutorial on shortly, however you can visit the excellent, recently revamped docs here. Without exaggeration I can honestly say this package saved me about 70% of the development time on a project involving 15-20 large entities, some 50-75 properties each. With DB_Dataojbect the state management is reduced to a few lines of code.
“PHP5 and PEAR could well make PHP unquestionably the #1 solution for building web sites.”